29 August 2013

sometimes i just look at your pictures
and that’s it
that’s all i do

//

People talk about the idea that with digital photographs, anybody can take ‘arty’ photographs – they just have to take enough photographs. Well, what’s wrong with that? If you like an image, you like it. And so with this poem, read in and ripped from Pop Serial. I really like it. But the other five poems on the page, well: four of the five seem like meh plus ultra, and I’ll leave you to your own comments about the first.

28 August 2013

A link to a ‘drop poem’ in the White Review: ‘To the Woman’ by Adam Seelig. A new form to me, and one that I can see making room for a mixture of simplicity, elegance, and fun. Or, in fact, whatever you can find.

24 August 2013

You made me tea
while I shook the rain from my jacket.
You stooped to fit into the kitchen
but handled the cups as if they’d been
the fontanelles of two young sons
whose picture sits in the hip of your 501s.
We spoke of – what? Not much.
You weren’t to know how much your touch
with the teaspoon stirred me,
how the tendons of your wide, divining hands
put me in mind of flight.

You wouldn’t have known
when you bent to tend a plant
that your shirt fell open a smile’s breadth.
You parted the leaves and plucked
a tiny green bud. Best to do that
with the early ones,you said.
I thought of the salt in the crook
of your arm where a fine vein kicks.
Of what it might be like to know
the knot and grain and beat of you;
the squeak of your heart’s pips.

24 August 2013

When they say, If there are any doctors aboard,would they make themselves known, I remember when my then
husband would rise, and I would get to be
the one he rose from beside. They say now
that it does not work, unless you are equal.
And after those first thirty years,
I was not the one he wanted to rise from
or return to – not I but she who would also
rise, when such were needed. Now I see them,
lifting, side by side, on wide,
medical, wading-bird wings – like storks with the
doctor bags of like-loves-like
dangling from their beaks. Oh well. It was the way
it was, he did not feel happy when words
were called for, and I stood.